Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil — What if the first-ever cloned jaguar were born within the next few years? Sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie?
Not to the scientists at Reprocon research group, based at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. They are collecting genetic material, like blood and tissue samples, from jaguars alive today, with the goal of cloning the species in the future — and potentially preventing its extinction.
As an apex predator, jaguars play a crucial role in regulating the animals below them in the food chain and keeping ecosystems healthy. But massive habitat loss has caused their populations to plummet. In some Brazilian biomes, such as the Caatinga and the Atlantic Forest, fewer than 250 individuals remain.
When jaguars are confined to fragmented habitats and small, isolated groups, they often end up mating with close relatives. This inbreeding reduces genetic diversity and can lead to malformations, miscarriages and increased vulnerability to disease and climate change.
To counter this, Reprocon researchers are turning to assisted reproductive technologies, including cloning. But as you might expect, this strategy is not without controversy, especially in a world where headlines recently claimed that the dire wolf had been “brought back from extinction” with great fanfare in 2025.
In our latest Mongabay Explains, we break down how scientists plan to clone a jaguar — and ask the bigger question: Is cloning truly a viable way to save a species from extinction?
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Banner image: Collage of a cloned jaguar.
Orangutans rescued undergo re-training to return to the wild
Transcript
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.We were successful in the capture.
It plays a very important role
in regulating all the fauna
that lives beneth it.
Well, the main threat to the jaguars in Brazil today
is the habitat loss.
Where large areas are turning into islands,
leading to the isolation of these populations
and thus increasing inbreeding.
We can smell the carrion.
We need to test it, so we can have an idea
of the strength the animal will have to do
for it to work.
See?
It caught it super quickly.
We were able to catch an animal.
And now we’re rushing to the location
to do the containment as quickly as possible.
Positive. From the footage, it looks calm.
Wonderful.
We got a male that is approximately 8 years old.
We can tell it by the wear and color of its teeth.
It’s a healthy animal.
We’re now collecting blood,
and next we will collect semen,
and finally, a small piece of tissue
to cryopreserve and grow fibroblasts.
The importance of assisted reproduction
applied to conservation is that
if I need to introduce new genetics to a given population
I have a source to draw from.
Cloning is a bit of a last resort
and it doesn’t have any success,
to be honest.
Taking something like the cattle industry where they do use cloning,
there are a lot of problems associated with the offspring
and calves have a high mortality rate.
and calves have a high mortality rate.
If you can do some technique in one type of species,
it doesn’t mean you can do the same technique in another one.
The anti-poaching,
the preservations of large areas of land.
Actions from government to prevent habitat loss,
and mitigate conflicts between
wild animals and humans.
When we talk about cloning, it doesn’t mean
it will save a species.
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